How Whiteboard.Chat makes education engaging, interactive and effective

Whiteboard.chat is a purpose-built, education-centric, teacher-designed entirely web-based service. No download needed, no registration required. You can easily search for it under “Apps” at Microsoft Teams, launch your notebook, create highly engaging lessons and pin your board for students to find and join your class. Refer to this detailed blog on working with Whiteboard.Chat in Microsoft Teams.

In this post, we will walk you through how to get started creating your lessons, work with students irrespective of their location, and observe, help and provide personalized feedback to students. At the end of the post we have listed additional resources for you to get a jump start with Whiteboard.Chat.

Preparing for your class:

As a teacher, click on “Start Drawing”, “Start Teaching” to create your digital notebook. You can visit our community contributed templates for all grades and subjects by going to “Manage Boards”, “Community Boards” and searching for the grade/subject and make a “Copy” of the book for yourself.

You can upload a multi-page worksheet with each page of the worksheet getting its own page at whiteboard.chat. You can enhance your lesson using the largest library of widgets, and manipulatives for science, math, languages and music. You have the ability to add answer-boxes with auto-correct ability, place audio or video instructions for students to follow, build digital escape rooms with password protected pages where students have to solve a puzzle, and use the answer as a key to move to the next page of the notebook. The possibilities to be creative are limitless and we keep adding new enhancements and features very frequently.

Here are a few screenshots of learning math as a digital escape room in the theme of St. Patrick’s Day, contributed by a teacher to our community boards.

Each click on the Leprechaun above will take students to a different math puzzle as shown below. Once a student has placed the right answer in the dropbox, they can click “Check It” for self-correction, collect the letter behind the coin and move to the next task.

Here is a snapshot of various digitized language, science, math and music manipulatives and active widgets available at Whiteboard.Chat.

Working with students:

Accessibility and inclusion are at the forefront of everything we do at Whiteboard.Chat. The digital notebook you built can be worked upon by students in-person, or they can join the class remotely. All they need to do is to click on the link to the book posted by the teacher. Again, no registration required. Students can work with pen and paper if that’s what they feel comfortable with, and upload pics of their work using a webcam directly on the Whiteboard. We have in-built immersive reader, handwriting recognition, writing practice grids, speech transcription and translation and a one-to-one messaging for teacher and students with simultaneous translation in multiple languages. Students can also signal to the teacher how they are progressing and if they need any help. Teachers can also paste a variety of quick ready-to-use feedback stickers on students’ boards. We are truly committed to making digital notebooks accessible to students irrespective of who they are, and where they are.

Here is a book that showcases how easy it is to work with students of all kinds of abilities, both remote and in-person.

Observing, and giving feedback to students:

Our unique feature is real-time observation of and engagement with all students who have joined the class. A teacher can click on “GridView” and can see exactly what each of their students is working upon. Noticing a student struggling, or requesting help, a teacher can join their board with a click of a button, and give personalized feedback and attention. Students can signal if they are finished, and the teacher can correct answers for all students, all pages or they have the ability to selectively correct students’ work as and when they finish their work. Students can continue to work on assignments even after the live class has ended and can continue to signal the teacher when they are finished. A teacher has the ability to download the work of all of their students as a report or record.

Here is how a GridView would look for an instructor for the earlier example of the digital escape room.

Additional resources:

We have compiled a list of additional resources for you to get started, and derive benefits from the limited possibilities available with Whiteboard.Chat

• A comprehensive listing of all features
• Top 100 popular features with hyperlinked tutorial videos
• Join our Teachers Using Whiteboard.Chat community group at Facebook
• Follow us at twitter for regular updates
• Subscribe to our YouTube Channel for hundreds of tutorial videos and recordings of live webinars